Let Freedom Ring… Where? How?

This roundabout discussion begins with a strange “revelation” that struck me earlier in the month.  Question: why does almost nobody in either house of Congress appear concerned about a 23-trillion-dollar national debt (not counting unfunded liabilities that would run up the tab at least fourfold)?  Some of our elected representatives can’t count, granted; and some are so deeply mired in graft and corruption that their interest in their fellow citizens’ future is equivalent to Marie Antoinette’s.  Yet I consider it obtusely cynical to consign virtually every member of both parties to one of these two categories.  What about the members who can do addition without their fingers and toes and who have also graduated to a modicum of normal adult responsibility?  How can they sit by and watch the dollar’s purchase power overheat and explode?

Answer (revelation): they must genuinely believe that the dollar’s collapse will be a good thing.

How can they believe this?  Because in such calamitous circumstances, the nations of the world would have to become—in a word much beloved of President Clinton whenever he discussed economic issues—interdependent.  All nations having grown equally insolvent, various political rivals around the planet will have to patch up their differences and create a single worldwide system.  Though I understand pitifully little about banking, it seems to me (based upon my limited research) that the world banking industry has already taken large strides toward assuming control over everybody’s finances, thanks to digitalization and other “initiatives”.  Baron Rothschild et al., for example, have a very clever plan for transforming “carbon credits” into a single world currency, centrally controlled by… Baron Rothschild et al.

All the same, would that be such a insufferably bad thing—I mean, one big clunking system?  The truth is that we haven’t yet seen a World War III, with over half a century having been run off the clock since the Cold War’s first dark days.  China, for all her saber-rattling, obviously knows that she can bring us to our knees just by standing back and watching us collapse under the effects of our own moral flabbiness.  No need for her to push buttons that may envelope the planet in radioactive dust for centuries: just let the Yanks continue to forget how to procreate, to snarl at each other because of skin color, and to medicate themselves with gateways to what Baudelaire aptly called “artificial paradises”.

Okay… I can see how some worldly-wise attorney whose understanding of human nature and history hovers at imbecilic levels would buy into this vision enthusiastically.  No more war.  No more borders.  No more doctors for some but not for others.  We know that Congress’s membership now includes several genuine, outspoken socialists—and many, many more on the Republican side have imbibed of Socialism Lite and decided that they can get used to the slightly sickening aftertaste.  Besides… well, I no doubt drew too heavy a line earlier between the principled and the corrupt.  You can endorse the “no more wars, no more borders” scenario in principle and also calculate, in the back of your mind, how you and your children are bound to enjoy certain privileges as members of the governing elite.

For the rest of us, though… I ask sincerely: what would be the disadvantages of living under a one-world government whose citizens are now forced to settle their differences without mushroom clouds?

I suggest that we can effectively prophesy daily life in such a “terminally safe” world just by looking closely—or, even better, viewing distantly for enhanced perspective—the beams and joists rising all about us right now.  Let this picture settle into focus. We would be fed constantly the “soma” of the broadcast media to sustain our state of contented ignorance and somnolent amusement.  We would be disarmed to ensure that the rare individual who went off his meds wouldn’t pose much of a threat.  We would be watched around the clock by indefatigable electronic eyes.  If we strayed into a public expression of “unproductive” criticism (and all criticism of the Unit, of course, would be classed as unproductive), Nanny Google would send us into time-out.  (In the classic BBC serial, The Prisoner, the extreme form of time-out—utter social ostracism—follows the Village Council’s verdict that one’s behavior is “unmutual”.)  Intrusive oversight wouldn’t stop at utterances, either. Our very facial expressions and body language would be monitored and graded.  The “People’s Republic” of China is already blazing the trail with ubiquitous surveillance cameras and a system of “virtue points”.  Those detected in moody or uncooperative attitudes would see their “credit score” docked sufficiently to deny them travel rights, perhaps, or to thwart their children’s entry into a good school. (Egalitarianism notwithstanding, the “right school” will remain a secret passage into the oligarchic elite’s corridors of power.)  I believe the Trump Administration has nodded in the direction of allowing similar surveillance to influence Second Amendment rights.  Nothing to worry about just yet, just now… but if you pay attention to the sand vibrating under the soles of your shoes, you can indeed discern the thump-thump-thump of some rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

So… there’s your choice.  Option One: life without fear of nuclear holocaust or immolation in Walmart’s bread aisle when a psycho’s girlfriend splits, at the cost of having your brow movements monitored as you brush your teeth.  Option Two: risk of all the fears eliminated in Option One, but with minimal cost of invisible surveillance and moralistic lecturing from Super-Nanny.  The more elderly of us will resist the first choice as its popularity swells, and we’ll probably end up in a mass grave after we flunk out of Re-education Camp for the third time.  The younger of us will be right at home with two-way mirrors everywhere they go, since they actually invite such constant universal exposure into their lives already with their “devices”.

Die, then, old warhorses!  Ye shall not by much precede the generation of asses who win but a few more years before the Committee on Social Harmony euthanizes them as they wait for a hip or knee replacement.

But is there really no alternative?  Are not our so-called “sanctuary cities” in fact pointing us in its direction?  What if we created discrete communities wherein people could live by their own rules—what if we went in that direction rather than transforming the entire human race into robots with uniform behavioral programming?  Let the West Coast, for instance, have marriage of species to other species or of one to three, five, or ten; borders that appear only on paper; one school curriculum, one income, one housing module, and one doctor with one bag of meds for all and sundry; free weed; and elections modeled after Major League Baseball’s All Star Game, where you vote as many times as you like.  Let those happy campers become a province of China, for all I care: they already are, for all I can make out.

On the other side of the continent, let the Southeast insist upon postings of the Ten Commandments in all public places.  Let her citizens be required to carry self-defensive weapons upon exiting the front door.  Abolish school districts: let each school teach that curriculum which concerned parents approve.  Let marriage exist only between a man and a woman, and let vandals who deface monuments cool their heels for a few months in the calaboose.

Let residents of one area who flee its “horrors” to a more congenial space be required to have settled in for five years before they enjoy full voting rights; and let regional legislatures be required to approve new law in two sessions with an intermission of at least two years between confirmations.  Build in some stability, some “drag”. Give customs and manners a fighting chance against George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg. Let cultures separate out according to their preferred values… and let surrounding cultures honor the shift of ethos that accompanies crossing a boundary marked on paper.

Why is this vision a pipedream?  Idealistic critics will say, “We went through all this Tenth Amendment crap with slavery.  If higher moral principle had not trumped regional special interests, human beings might still be laboring under the whip in the Deep South.”  Well… the rude release of illiterate and unskilled slave populations into “freedom” was in fact responsible for much of the misery that descendants of freedmen carried well into the next century; and the considerable opposition to slavery within the South would have expelled it even before the Civil War, perhaps, if national politics hadn’t introduced a complex friction of economic interests (cf. Marc Egnal’s Clash of Extremes).  May I point out, too, that many of our idealists who would raise this protest make no such noise when Muslim immigrants insist upon introducing the brutality of Sharia into their new neighborhoods?

The real obstacle, of course, is practical.  What will keep regional equivalents of the insatiably power-hungry Chinese elite—or the Chinese themselves—from occupying Alabama if New Mexico becomes a convenient launching point? Should states (and I mean all political states, not just the late-great “united” ones) solemnly undersign a treaty that will require each to come to the rescue if a bully invades a weakling? But we know this won’t work. Our current domestic politics show us nothing if not that progressive ideologues treat promises with contempt—and why wouldn’t they? Since reality is “evolving”, the circumstances involved in the promise you made yesterday are already irrelevant tomorrow.

The Chinese will lie, as they always do (unless truth proves more expedient in specific instances); and their ally states from California to Washington will connive at the lying, since their governing elite is more Machiavellian than that founding father of calculated duplicity. I see no alternative but for more principled states to bend their principles—near the breaking point sometimes—in the formation of effective counter-alliances. The Southeast, for instance, could team readily enough with Israel… but to muster the muscle necessary for browbeating China into retreat, it might also have to pact with Putin. India is another obvious friend; but Indonesia? Some of the more stable, adult-friendly Islamic republics?

This is a new pair of unsavory options. Do you lock arms with a neighbor who beats his wife as the pirates come streaming off their ship… or do you board up your own doors and windows, hoping for the best? The survival of states where the individual may still be free to grope his way toward God will almost certainly depend upon alliances with other states whose god is not ours.

Putin at least claims to be Christian, and at least makes an outward show of valuing the nuclear family and a modest level of public decency. He sent the obscene Pussy Riot crew to prison for a year: not an act that sits well with an American constitutionalist, but vastly preferable to Ted Wheeler’s allowing Antifa to bludgeon harmless bystanders. Aleksandr Litvinenko was probably poisoned on Putin’s nod… yes, and Vince Foster probably didn’t commit suicide. Putin seized Crimea—after a public plebiscite overwhelmingly approved the annexation. Putin silences dissident reporters, we hear; minister’s daughter Angela Merkel silences them at least as well with the help of former East German propagandists policing the Internet and wielding “hate speech” like a Stasi thug’s choke-hold. Our Pythoness, Wikipedia, warns that Putin’s trusted advisor, Aleksandr Dugin, is a fascist—but Dugin seems very confused himself about his pedigree: an anti-communist who admires Lenin and a Russian nationalist who treasures culturally diverse traditions.

When the most important thing is at last to have co-signatories in the mutual defense pact who keep their word, it may be that belief in God—some immortal god, any creator-god—is the only relevant factor in resisting the aggressive holy war of Secular Utopians, whose god is tear-it-all-down Whimsy. Societies whose members hold something immutable and sacred beyond this world’s terms are under vast attack. (I’m not keen on the Koran—but we “Islamophobes” should notice what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs.) While not all such “believing” societies encourage the individual search for the divine, the alternative is an annihilation of the divine in bursts of individual petulance that soon settle into an animal sameness (lust, fear, envy, and the rest).

Of course, if our critical requirement for alliance is a belief in a higher power that postpones utter joy and perfect justice to another dimension, then a good many of our “Christian” ministers and priests will have to ally themselves with our adversaries. We would have to banish them to California, if they aren’t already there.

In summary, I would dare to say that a realistic hope for humane civilization is possible… but only if we don’t hope for too much humanity from our military back-up.

An Honest Conversation About Race? Here Goes…

I had another subject in mind for this week until I read Rachel Alexander’s “How I Massively Triggered the Left on Twitter” (Intellectual Conservative, September 15) http://www.intellectualconservative.com/how-i-massively-triggered-the-left-on-twitter/.  I won’t rehash the details: they’re quite sickening—another of countless examples showing that incivility in our decadent society has just about entered the bullying Brownshirt stage (with the thuggery stopping just this side of physical assault… usually).

Let’s put it this way.  If X’s political opinions fall well left of center and Y’s are slightly to the right, then X is allowed to call Y a racist.  “That’s kind of insane,” Y protests, “inasmuch as my long-time mate was a person whose DNA was almost entirely African.”  “So what?” X snaps back.  “That’s a well-known racist trick—taking a non-white mate to prove you’re not racist!  As if you didn’t know that slaveowners raped their slave girls all the time.”  “Um… I don’t think my friend would fit the description of a slave girl,” Y smiles.  “No!” X snarls.  “More like race-traitor!  It’s not hard for whites to find some Sambo or Sallie who will sell out just for the joy of slithering into the plantation manor through the back window!”  If Y is still responding to this rabid primate meagerly endowed with the power of speech, the response might be, “But I’m actually not Caucasian myself, for the most part.”  Showing long canines, X howls back, “Then why do you carry the white man’s water and mop up his s**t?”

More often then not, the person shooting back this impressive balance of vulgarity and stupidity will himself (or, increasingly, herself) be Caucasian.  White icing on the leftist cannabis cake.

Now, what I’m about to add to this “discussion” will get me killed within ten years, probably, when some Stalinist Santa Claws, trawling through the communications of everyone’s life to see who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, will punch tickets for the one-way train.  But I’m old enough not to care.

I’ll start with my fellow citizens of African descent.  Some of them, I suspect, don’t like themselves very much.  Why would they?  Their society has never offered any other group so many “advance three squares” cards.  College scholarships are bending the limbs, ripe for the picking.  Publicly funded organizations are waving black applicants to the front of the line, and many private-sector companies maintain quota systems for purposes of public relations.  Lawsuits over racial prejudice (or the threat of such lawsuits) protect sub-par performance like some mythical Ring of Invincibility.  Yet still… yet still, there you are, a young black male who emerged from high school hardly reading at seventh-grade level.  You couldn’t even land a basketball scholarship, which is how your best friend got into college; but one thing you have indeed been able to do by the age of eighteen is sire three children on three different women… or girls… none of which children you ever see or pay a dime to support.

Or maybe you’re one of the three girls.  You’ll have another three or four kids before you’re thirty (and perhaps the same number of abortions).  Medicaid gives you a couple of thou a month for each one of them—a really nice haul for unskilled labor.  So that’s your job.  That’s what your society has decreed you will be and do in this life: a baby-mill, a womb that grinds out little ones with prospects even dimmer than yours.

That would settle me into a permanently pissed-off mood, as well.  Imagine the inner conversation—a dialogue with Self that doesn’t take place in words, but must be gnawing around the edges of consciousness all the time:

“Could I have done more with my life?  Sure… at least I think so.  I think I’ve got something special in me somewhere… but the world will never know, and I’ll never know.  I didn’t open the door to that something: I let myself become just another number.  Now, it wasn’t all my fault.  In fact, loud voices keep filling my ear with talk of ‘systemic racism’—and it does seem like the game was rigged.  I couldn’t have throttled all of that potential, all of those vague ambitions, all by myself.  The system showered me with stuff and snitched away my real chances at the same time.  It paid me off.  It bribed me to play the role of someone who’s good for nothing.  And the bribe was pretty hefty sometimes (though sometimes it was just a magic trick, and a fat check that became genuine poverty)….

“But I didn’t have to take the bribe.  Deep down, I knew that.  I don’t like myself for taking the easy way out, for being suckered into the worse option.  And I don’t like not liking myself—going around hour after hour, day in and day out, not really liking myself.  That makes me even more pissed off.  Racism?  Reparations?  Okay.  I’ll take that.  I don’t really know what it all means… or I know damn well, rather, that the people peddling it have no idea what it means.  I just know that somebody’s getting bled for my misery—and that’s okay with me.  Somebody ought to.  I’m not that good—but they’re even worse, the ‘somebodies’, because all they did was help me bury whatever was better in me.”

Self-contempt, resentment of the world for feeding that contempt… those are two strong emotions hiding—barely hiding—under the “you’re a racist!” veil of invective.  One of the things “racist” now means in mouths that love to launch the word (if it still means anything at all) is that you don’t have a very high estimate of yourself and you hold others responsible for it: the others who keep pitying you for being on the bottom just when you were taking a little pride in getting your life together.

Now let’s take a good look at white folks—at certain white folks.  Would you believe that a lot of white males on the left are afraid of black males?  A not insignificant cause of the South’s secession was the terror that slaves (who represented well over half the population of Mississippi and other pockets of the Deep South) would revolt en masse and slaughter every white.  John Brown tapped into this terror.  The massive and successful slave uprising in Haiti a few decades earlier was also very much on the Southern mind.

In this regard (and in more than one or two others), the leftist male is less Rhett Butler than Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr.  He’s not a strong man—not morally, not intellectually, and beyond doubt not physically.  Strong black males intimidate him; I think they almost induce a kind of internal panic in him.  What if he says something wrong—what if these powerful and subliminally simmering people go to a sudden boil over some ill-chosen phrase?  I have only to look at a desk full of ESPN “white woke” males surrounding some gargantuan hero of the turf to catch this vibe strongly.  “Wow, B.J.—I mean, wow, man… wow, dog… the way you shredded their defense… you’re my son’s all-time favorite player… and mine, too, of course… what was your reaction when you were unanimous MVP?  Were you ever sorry that you didn’t choose another sport?  I mean, you were so multi-talented in college!”

Somehow, such unctuous accolades never quite smell like true admiration to me.  There’s an acrid odor blended into them—a touch of fear.  Physical fear.  Part of the reason white males become progressives (I’m not calling it a major reason, but I sense a contribution) is that black males physically intimidate them.  Now, men don’t like feeling intimidated, even the least male of them.  Something primal in them—in us—insists upon creating a survival strategy.  The strategy of the white male progressive is to bind the mighty black male in chains of adulation.  “Surely he won’t hit me if he sees that I adore him.  And I do adore him!  He’s so… not me!  Damn him.  But if I give him what he wants, what he understands—all that he’s capable of understanding—and lift him on the pedestal I’ve made for the greatest gladiator of all time, then… then he won’t be able to pound me into powder without losing what he really needs: an abject, sycophantic admirer.  I’ve got him there.  I’m safe.”

Here, I suspect, is where we find much of the motivation behind the “you f——-g racist!” tweets originating from keyboards that no black finger has ever touched.  The “writer” (how debased that word has grown!) hides impenetrably behind an avatar that might as well be Django or Mister T.  In his e-cape of invisibility, he heavily imbibes that “bad ass” ichor which he’s convinced circulates abundantly in African veins… so unlike his white identity, which has never elevated him above a mere ass.  On the Internet, he can sling obscenities like a rapper and intimidate others with his newly (falsely) acquired blackness.  “Racist” from his virtual mouth, from his soiled fingertips, means just this: “Be afraid of me!  I’ll dox you—I’ll get beat you up!  I’ll rape you—I’ll murder you!”  Yep.  That one little word—racist—is a terrorist threat to every minute of whatever time you have left on earth… or that’s what the punk would like it to be.

Naturally, the former kind of verbal assailant—the genuinely black person who allows “racist” to monopolize his or her vocabulary—is a lot more simpatico.  After all, that person is right, in a way.  If you keep throwing money at a black child (or in his direction: most of it will never reach his doorstep) instead of demanding that he pass algebra, you’re telling him that he’s stupid; that he can’t help being stupid, that he’ll always be stupid, but that you’ll keep the subsidies coming so that he doesn’t starve on the streets.  There’s irony, to be sure, in his reserving the “r” word precisely for those who would cut off the unconditional subsidies and require a passing test score… but how else is he supposed to react?  Because now he needs permanent subsidizing—now that you’ve robbed him both of his best opportunity to learn and of his self-respect.

Somehow, I just don’t think that’s the guy—or the girl—who wastes time spewing and slavering e-idiocy in the direction of people like Rachel Alexander.  I can see Maxine Waters doing it, because that’s her gig; and I can see Jemele Hill doing it, because she’s a ball of psychotic rage that will send a death ray through any opening.  But make no mistake: the people who most need black Americans to be victims of “systemic racism” are white leftists—and not even, or not just, because the canard gins up their base (as it does for Waters).  No, these are nameless people with no brilliant future before them.  They, too, are balls of rage.  And they need the avatar, the stereotype—the caricature—of the snubbed, derided, cheated, beaten, and lynched freedman’s muscular son roaring back on a cloud of vengeance to channel all their frustration.

“Racist” means “I’m so pissed off, I’m not taking any blame for it, I know my filthy eiecta scare and disgust you… and, oh, that makes me so happy! That’s the one thing that makes me happy!  Lick my s—t, white man!”

Jemele Hill was never more white than when she decided to take this road.

Me and MPC: “Christianity Lite” and the Death of the Spirit

For the purposes of this “dialogue”, I’m going to personify the doctrine that I see (on websites) and hear (in services) coming out of contemporary Methodist and Presbyterian USA congregations as MPC.  I will also lay as a ground rule that we will not bandy Bible verses.  I freely concede that I would lose such a tennis match to anyone who has spent years in a seminary… but I find, in any case, that bending Scripture into heated discussions is equivalent to wrangling over whether an Inkblot Test portrays a dog on a chain or a prickly pear cactus.  That kind of exchange isn’t very edifying.

ME: My thumbnail definition of Christianity would run something like this.  Every human being has a soul, and all souls are unique and precious to God.  They are constantly called toward closer union with Him, and that coalescence becomes a state beyond time that discovers utter fulfillment.  Yet souls resist the call as they pass from earthly childhood to adulthood, and they may be lost when the ends of this world replace the higher, inexpressible ends that work through this world’s matter to make themselves more visible.  Hence a radical reorientation in the adult—a “birth from above”—is required to lift his nose out of the glittering muck.

MPC: Yes, of course.  God calls upon us to serve others… and we fight fiercely against that duty as we busily feather our own selfish nest.  It’s a shock to us to realize that we’re often not living life even when we are busiest—but we busy ourselves with the wrong things.  We are immersed in life, but not in living it. For we must act in the here and now in order to serve others.  Airy pieties do not feed the hungry, cure the sick, or clothe the poor.  The way to the Kingdom is through energetic activity.  We must give generously of our time and possessions.  We must fight on all fronts against worldly forces that starve the less fortunate or hold them in chains: that is our high calling.

ME: Is it?  In a way, certainly… but your explanation appears to me to risk confusion.  Isn’t part of our calling also to dissuade other people from surrendering their lives to utter immersion in worldly affairs?  Yet if I will achieve my high purpose only to the degree that I fight poverty and injustice, then it seems reasonable that I would spend every waking hour soliciting donations or filing motions; not only that, but I should probably also amass a maximum of wealth so that I might devote it to those worthy causes.  And it would also seem that the impoverished and the unjustly imprisoned cannot live fulfilling lives without the intercession of energetic, wealthy benefactors like me.  Yet I personally find that such people are often light-years ahead of their “benefactors” spiritually.

MPC: Which is precisely why we must assist them rather than standing by in idle complacency.  They’re our brothers and sisters!  We would readily recognize the common humanity in them if we did not allow social convention to insulate us from the greater need, the higher calling.  Our membership in the arbitrary socio-economic communities into which we were born keeps pulling us down into a torpid, “us/them” mindset that paralyzes us.

ME: Yes, I’ve often noticed that you’re an inveterate enemy of social convention.  You don’t like settled communities, do you—except those church communities of your own design, some of whose orders of worship and representations of duty can be… pretty inflexible.  Somewhere in all of your “replacement conventions” is the line one crosses into introductory cultism.

MPC: That, of course, is an invidious portrayal of our mission and not deserving of a response.  Yet it is true that we must labor tirelessly to loosen the glue that holds people inactive because they believe their brethren to be only among those who speak their language, wear their kind of clothing, and live in their kind of neighborhood.

ME: Well, there’s no condescending generalization at all in that portrayal, is there?  But let’s stipulate that human communities (your communions, too, by the way) tend to brainwash people—for I see no need to mince words: we’re talking about behavioral conditioning.  Do you not find it perfectly absurd to maintain that any human being can mature healthily and successfully in a cultural vacuum—an environment where the day has no tendency to rhythm and social interaction no predictable niceties?  People would go paranoid en masse!  They would live trembling under rubble like the survivors of Troy after the city was sacked and burned.

MPC: And this, brother, is just why our communions groom that “cult” of worshipful daily life at which you sneer.  People need organization—and how better to organize their lives than around acts of loving concern and ritual sharing?

ME: You have now negated the moral value both of loving and of sharing, though you have blundered into a very honest description, I believe, of your objectives.  What I see in all this is you of the priestly caste prescribing virtuous behavior to your… flock, shall we call them… and they obeying mindlessly in the confidence that their prophets know better than they what is to be done.  You will tell me, perhaps, that playing Moses to the herd is an onerous burden, and one that you would willingly have rejected if not impelled by a higher voice.

MPC: Mock on, brother.  We are not strangers to persecution.  But the sad truth is that the oppressed would remain in chains and the poor sit starving in their hovels if all were such as you.  Yes, people require leadership.  They must be organized.

ME: Organized to accomplish the bare necessities of living, yes—but their will must be left free!  Look: is your objective to enter the figure “zero” in the Homeless and Starving categories, even though you have to program the populace rigorously to reach that end; or is it to facilitate the discovery of a passage to God among individual souls?

MPC: This is more of that airy speculation which, if indulged, would indeed leave thousands of people homeless and starving.  We promote action, not “feel good” formulas.

ME: I consider that very, very debatable.  But let’s stay at the practical level.  Do you dispute that even the bluntest pagan will share food with his starving neighbor out of primitive decency?  In fact, small tribal societies are the most generous in the world at this kind of thing.  Yet you say that vast communities of givers must be orchestrated to maximize the efficiency of the relief effort (once again casting yourselves, I notice, in the role of the unit’s collective conscience).  Shouldn’t your calling, rather, be to awaken people far and wide from their fixation with mere physical survival, and beyond that from their determination to strike a admirable pose before the eyes of the masses?  If you can do that, then they will embellish their rudimentary decency with higher service—perhaps with less money-making and more dedication to playing with their children or cultivating trees that survived the developer’s bulldozer.  If you awaken people to indefinite ends, that is, you may just find that you get most of the definite results you want.  A man who pauses to notice the stars is at least as likely to play Good Samaritan as a robot programmed to change tires for stranded motorists.  But no!  Not good enough!  You’ve hopped several squares at once in this board game, as it were: you’ve directed everyone just how to be concerned and where to give.  You’ve created efficiency.  Your gospel might as well be a Stalinist five-year plan.

MPC: Oh, yes—it was bound to come to this sooner or later, wasn’t it?  The “c” word, the “s” word.  We’re communists, then… we’re socialists, is it?  Well, I know you don’t like to hear the Gospels quoted… so let’s try a different citation.  As a matter of fact, the plan that Jesus lays out for human society is essentially a socialist one, and there’s no reason why he wouldn’t have uttered, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

ME: Ah, yes: Saint Karl!  But let me shift this… discussion… to a different footing.  Let’s grant that the Christian’s high mission is to feed the hungry and clothe the poor.  And let’s say that the mission is accomplished, as it may indeed be.  Obesity is already reaching epidemic proportions even in some Third World nations—and look at the so-called refugees pouring into Europe who are sporting Nikes and Land’s End workout suits.

MPC: The poor are always with you, brother… but pardon my slip of the tongue!  I quoted Scripture!

ME: No harm done—you happen to have quoted it very ineptly.  Christ utters those words exactly to underscore that the objective is not a smooth-running social machine.  But say, if you can possibly imagine, that one day you awaken to find no hungry to feed and no naked to clothe.  You’d be done, wouldn’t you?  Your church would have no further reason for being.  You need the needy!  You desperately need them.  You need them to be needy.  If they didn’t exist (as Voltaire quipped of God), you’d have to invent them.  Your purpose, your direction… it would be gone.  Your god would be dead.

MPC: How puerile!  How pitiful!  And all of this just to justify your sitting on your pile of loathsome lucre instead of helping your fellow man!

ME: Not an answer… and, by the way, you have no idea how I live or what my income is.  We can compare homes and cars later, if you like.  But okay, let’s stay with your new theme of rationalizing an egotistical choice with hifalutin motives.  Let’s talk about justice for a minute—a word you strain with even greater overuse than “gift”.  You exhort your congregation not to go to bed at night if the day hasn’t included some step toward bringing more justice into the world.

MPC: And, no doubt, that disturbs you for some strange reason.

ME: Yes.  It disturbs me because… how do you know?

MPC: How… do we know what?

ME: Where the just course lies?  How do you, miserable human being, know that a boy’s life of relative poverty isn’t preparing him for an adulthood of noble, enduring, invincible accomplishment?  You haven’t even visited the boy’s home!  How do you know that the dark-eyed alien facing twenty years for child-molestation isn’t actually a child-molester?  You haven’t even reviewed the case against him!  You cram individuals into sweeping categories that fit your script—and then you proceed with the script, ignoring specific circumstances and significant evidence.  You have no time for details: you have to create a fairy tale in which you play the plumed hero on a white charger!

MPC: Whereas you, once again, would just leave the boy mired in poverty and the disenfranchised suspect rotting in jail while you interminably dig for “further evidence”… all so that you don’t have to move a muscle.

ME: You’re claiming that I rearrange reality to favor my complacency—yet you can’t so much as conceive of the possibility that you do the same, at a much worse level, by brushing over details in generating just the little drama where you can play the hero, the true believer.  You never seem to harbor the slightest suspicion that perhaps what you call “justice” is a very simplistic reading of a complex situation.

MPC: Yes, everything must always be complex, mustn’t it?  Complexity is always an excellent excuse for doing nothing.

ME: And doing nothing is usually a better alternative than doing the wrong thing—such as destroying initiative in young people to have them be the little victims you pull from the fire, or releasing a mass-murderer upon the public who has been cast as someone wrongfully condemned by a racist jury.

MPC: My goodness!  We wouldn’t be speaking just a little bit stereotypically there, would we?

ME: No!  Not typically at all!  Specifically!  I speak of specific cases that get nudged aside in your stereotypes… and you refuse to allow the reality of exceptions to your rule.  Anyone who questions your categories is “stereotyping”!

MPC: I can see little hope for discovering common ground in this conversation.  I’m afraid the action of the spirit must precede any such exchange if significant compromise is to be reached… and the spirit has simply not touched you.

ME: What spirit, precisely?  For that’s the final point I would have made, the endgame.  What in your system, finally, is spiritual?  What you project forward into the “eschaton” is the truly perfected human society, where nobody does anything he doesn’t want to do, where all have their needs utterly fulfilled… and I don’t see where God fits into the picture, except as the architect of the whole thing: a boy with an ant farm between two pieces of glass who wakes up one morning and finds that his insects have finally figured out their tunnels.  The ultimate purpose of the human soul is to crawl happily about in human tunnels, visiting a friend here, a friend there.  Nothing but friends, everywhere!  But no God.  Where is the fusion with God’s mind in which the Christian is supposed to hope and to which he is meant to summon others?  Where is God’s mind?  Where is the intersection of the galaxies, the music that plays outside of linear time?  I see nothing in your miserable utopian prison but human architect ground out by very human minds.  It sickens me!

MPC: Peace, brother.  We’ll all pray for you.  Struggle can be fertile.  Our doors are open to you whenever you wish to enter.

… And so it goes.  Please view my brief new videos, The Perverted Concept of Justice in the Secular-Utopian Church and The Perverted Concept of Giving in the Secular-Utopian Church, if these subjects interest you.

The Seventies: Our First Full Decade of Cultural Decline

(I’ve been utterly preoccupied this week with preparing a re-edition of a novel invisibly published almost twenty years ago: Footprints in the Snow of the Moon. I hope to have it accessible on Amazon by mid-week. In writing the preface, at any rate, I decided that I could post an excerpt here that might not be uninteresting to IC’s audience.)

I heard a television documentary declare recently that Sharon Tate’s murder at the insane hands of the Manson gang was the end of the Sixties.  The remark wasn’t intended chronologically: its implication was plainly that the depraved brutality of the deed corrupted the “Sixties dream” and exiled American culture from the Eden of free love and rejection of social hierarchy.  If only, if only a few crazed loons hadn’t flown off the preserve!

In a far more significant sense, the Manson murders (there were several, by the way) were the climax of the Sixties—the necessary, inevitable dark fruit of a poisoned tree.  When human beings are freed of their inhibitions, the animal impulses that come to the surface vying for control may be lamb-like one instant… and then lupine the next.  Not that any wolf deserves to be defamed by comparison with Charles Manson: no, the human being wholly liberated of shame or guilt is an infinitely more atrocious creature than anything we can find in raw nature.  Thanks to his imagination, he can indulge a lust that has no analogue in any merely brutish chemistry: not a lust for sex or food, but for dominating the will of others—libido dominandi.

In unmooring the individual will from the cables with which two and a half millennia (punctuated by a few notable lacunae) of Judeo-Christian and classical Stoic morality had secured it, the Sixties set a generation of directionless young people loose upon each other—looking high and low for what they “wanted” and what they considered “relevant”, brushing aside entire systems and institutions that they considered “old” or “patriarchal”.  Frankly, this thumbnail sketch of the Sixties ethos is already in error: only the final years of the decade grew “radical”.  Most of the cultural clearing-and-leveling labor was accomplished in the Seventies.

Now, I will not maintain that the decade of flaring cuffs and collars, bushy unisex hair styles, and anorexic pop-singers saw a proliferation of drug-addicted mass-murderers.  Manson, let us say, was the face reflected in the pool at the chasm’s bottom.  For if human beings are distinct from the purely animal in bearing their blessed curse of free will and imagination, their distinction remains grafted upon an animal substrate.  They like to move in herds.  The herd lifts from the individual’s shoulders the complex burdens of freedom.  The hand of Satan that scrawled “helter skelter” in Sharon Tate’s blood no doubt hazed many a young “free spirit” away from the edge.  Indulging impulse was tamed (superficially and for the time being) into a social endeavor, and even a sociable one.  In those passive, pacifist Seventies, it turned out that you could “find yourself” while looking and acting exactly like the legions of “seekers” all around you; and this was indeed unsurprising, because it also turned out that our “self” was essentially a construct of DNA—our instinct to mate, our natural aversion to forced labor, our inbred terror of physical threat, our primate comfort in belonging to a group.

Statistical outliers—rogue elephants—would register a dangerous resurgence in the Eighties, when the cult of pleasure irresistibly fed into a cult of acquisitive hunger.  For most of the intermediate decade, however, I observed my peers to be lingering in an insipid sameness, neither searching for a guru in India like the Beatles nor snorting cocaine to amass royal fortunes on Wall Street.  The Seventies were a trough between crests.  They were a lull in whose wash uninspired hordes supposed themselves to be riding the wild surf.

The word “infantilism” would leap to mind if the present time had not laid yet a better claim to it.  Today, as I sit writing, college students are (as an abandoned cliché once had it) “much as nature might have left them”.  Several years ago already, my undergraduates hadn’t a clue what I intended when, as we read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight together, I associated the evocation of fertility in Arthur’s all-green visitor with the recovery of longer days after the winter solstice.  Most of them didn’t know what a solstice was.  Now their younger brothers and sisters are lecturing all of us on the planet’s climate and ordering us to “shut up” if we raise an objection.

In comparison, the overgrown children of the Seventies were at least not rude brats.  And they had developed a decisive gender—very decisive!  In that they could be said to have blazed a trail into puberty that leaves their contemporaries far behind.  Yet their hair still grew long in the pristine ringlets whose first formal shearing brings mothers to tears.  Their bodies were of the supple quality that allows toddlers to absorb infinite falls without taking much harm.  In fact, it was wrong of me to celebrate puberty in them with such confidence; some of the girls, at least, had found a way to resist menstruation.  I know I mentioned anorexia in passing.

Wasn’t abortion part of the same bid for “prolonged innocence”?  Children don’t become mothers and fathers, so… so pregnancies just shouldn’t be happening.  Something was amiss there.  Reset the clock and go back to playing in the nursery: those two months of alarming discomfort never happened.

Well, our overgrown children today appear to have discovered the full Mansonian potential of sacrificing small, fleshy masses with little fingers and tiny noses.  It’s a rite performed to a known god whose name I shall not repeat.  In that respect as in so many others, I prefer the “terminal adolescence” of the Seventies.  Observers of the scene back then could still see that something was wrong; and the gullible young fools sucked into doing the wrong still had, as often as not, an inkling that they had been led astray.  It was a time suitable to be the backdrop of a morality play, whereas today… today we find only the appalling chaos fit for writing what the ancients would have called a catabasis: a journey through Hell.

Why the difference?  I think it consists entirely in this: fifty years ago, vestiges of those twenty-five hundred years of Western culture lingered among the herd’s hoofprints.  Today, they’re all gone.  Fifty years ago, the young who had jettisoned the cargo of Western civilization in favor of “relevance” (which, in terms of college work, involved a much lightened reading list: a very happy accident in the Decade of Pleasure) had still seen Franco Zeffirelli’s version of Romeo and Juliet and Robert Bolt’s Man for All Seasons at the movies.  Today’s graduate students have cut their narrative teeth on comic-book superheroes—about whom some of them will probably write a dissertation.  I devoutly hope that a few of our twenty-first century crop will find their way out of Hell, having heeded a spiritual voice within that can easily outshout the Call of the Sociopath if attended to… yet Hell is where they are, where they have to search for exits.  Fifty years ago, exits higher up the road were still open.  They just weren’t being well maintained.

Nothing distresses me more in retrospect about that lost decade than the invertebracy of the Christian church in the face of so many formidable challenges.  As a young man navigating the day’s troubled waters, I had a keen sense that most Christian denominations were responding to the times, “Wait!  Don’t leave us behind!  We’re one of you!  Love, peace, togetherness, a better world… that’s what we’re all about!”  Yes… and that was apparently all they were about: no sin, no guilt, no repentance, no abstinence, no difficult ascent through stones and briars, no resistance to worldly seductions.  No comfort.  In my experience of the Seventies, the Church desperately fought against irrelevancy by rendering itself irrelevant.  Those whom it courted abjectly had already found what they craved in the here-and-now; or if their souls were not wholly drained of breath and secretly craved a lifeline to the Beyond, the Church had cast aside that line in its zeal to fashion a better here-and-now.

Again, one might make precisely the same claim of organized Christianity in the twenty-first century, and make it with a vengeance; but the trend began when trousers rode low, their buckles spread broad, and their bottoms belled wide.

I could write lengthily about the “charismatic” movements that sometimes spiraled into cultism during this decade—but I should be wandering too far afield from the subjects addressed in Footprints, which do not include these.  If I lend any emphasis at all to the matter of religion here, it’s because the novel struck me so powerfully—as I edited it after almost two decades—as groping for the spiritual.  This, too, seems to me characteristic of the Seventies: I mean, groping clumsily after something fulfilling and immaterial… and not being able to find it.  Finding substitutes for it in all the wrong places.  Yet again, yes, one might say as much of any generation of human beings.  The difference is that most such generations were graced with some form of organized faith that offered a clear alternative to sex, drugs, wealth, and power.  The Seventies, having inherited from the previous years a contempt for all reverend institutions, were left with a Church that embraced the secular world’s facile opposition of sex and drugs to wealth and power, as if those pairs defined adversarial ends of a spectrum.

The charismatic represented less a third way—a midpoint on the spectrum—than a retreat into that infantilism (too young for sex, too young for power) typical of the era’s approach to other moral crises.  There was no genuine escape from this world’s traps (and Sartre’s Huis Clos, whose title literally translates such despair, was taught in every sophomore French class).  Those who survived the day’s Charybdis of rival forces circling the same focal void and were at last spewed out upon Odysseus’s stunted fig tree faced a bleak, lonely prospect.

One of my faithful collaborators in the charitable venture, The Center for Literate Values, gave the original novel a kind review (what else would you expect of any officer in a public charity?)—but voiced a mild regret that the book did not investigate faith as a solution.  I won’t say that I took the criticism under advisement in my rewriting.  Rather, in my rewriting, I discovered that the forces I had unleashed in these fairly ordinary Middle Americans (ordinary on the surface—the only level at which anyone is ordinary), most of them well under thirty, needed to “blow up the world” a little more.  There needed to be more frustration with the options offered by a relatively smooth-purring, profitably hedonistic society now free and clear of the Vietnam nightmare.  I don’t say that there needed to be more options: faith often grows exactly because more is needed but no further options are possible.  I felt a considerable pressure to let something intrude into my “dystopic pastoral” which would lighten life’s burdens, paradoxically, by acknowledging that burdens don’t disappear in this life.

I had to make the narrator turn somewhat more consciously mature at the end.  And I did so: that’s the book’s major change.  Some may persist, “But I still don’t see his faith taking shape.  Where’s his faith?”  My answer: not in the things and people of this world—but running straight through them; not in the institutions of this world, but thriving in spite of them.

How many people in fact weathered the Seventies with a spiritual insight of such elevation?  Well… as a novelist, I don’t do statistical analysis.  I try to present the most instructive case, and sometimes I thereby present the least probable.  I will bring to general attention, however, that the narrator’s retrospective places his final thoughts in the late Nineties: he’s had plenty of time to mull it all over.  If you were “on the ground” during that somnolent spiritual war which was the late Seventies, you didn’t yet know that promiscuous sex might harm your body as well as your soul: AIDS was yet unheard-of.  You didn’t know that foreign nationals might plot to murder thousands of your neighbors in the midst of their routine: plane hijackings always ended with a rerouting to Beirut or Tripoli, usually after the passengers were swapped out for a million bucks.  You didn’t know that school children might so much as fantasize about gunning their classmates down: video games and our sociopathologizing “social media” were a glimmer in some developer’s eye.

I doubt that we learned much of anything from the Seventies, in short, while they were being played out.  Any lesson would have come years later (and it doesn’t appear that most of us have learned the full lesson, even fifty years later).  What I like about the Seventies as an artist, though, is precisely that they are “pure” of mixed motive when one scans them for moral cautionary tales.  At the time, no one would have known just how risky to bodily health and mere survival were many trendy new habits.  The only reason for resisting them would have been abstract: a stand in principle uncomplicated by a gun pointed at the head.

Eradicating the Sense of Moral Guilt: “Justice” in the PC Era

I am going to offer three examples by way of considering the issue of whether or not a business owner should be permitted to refuse service to a customer on moral grounds.

I’ll lead into the first example by recalling the business of my grandmother.  From a reverend old house in Austin with four Ionic columns facing West 14^th, constructed in 1873, she directed a small but profitable operation.  She and my grandfather lived on the original structure’s bottom floor; the rest she transformed into nine apartments rented to single occupants.  She had a peculiar requirement of her tenants, though not so peculiar back in the Fifties and Sixties: she demanded that they not bring home overnight guests.  Naturally, the intent of the stricture was not to ban a visiting parent or relative.  Put simply, tenants were not to import boyfriends or girlfriends onto the premises for night-long stays.  Today, any mass of idlers on their iPhones would vote down such moral “bigotry” in a trice.  Yet the restriction was indeed founded upon my grandmother’s moral convictions, and the times were initially not against her even in Austin, Texas.

Since she paid the utility bills for her tenants, as a practical-minded advocate might observe, a long stream of casual lovers visiting one or more occupants could represent a not inconsiderable financial burden to her—but this was not the crux of the issue for my grandmother.  Nevertheless, our advocate might add that toward the end of her life, when tenants increasingly began to dishonor this part of their verbal pledge, abuse of the furnishings and defacing of the property also increased.  Those like me who were spectators of this cultural drama are tempted to conclude that one kind of moral dissolution played into several others.

With that much in preface, let me now offer my first hypothetical.  Imagine a hotel (or “an hotel”, as people used to say) in Township X.  The route from W to Z is a long one, X being the only stop besides Y, which is another 120 miles down the road.  Yet the proprietor of X’s one hotel refuses to rent rooms to people of a certain race or ethnicity.  All responsible adults would agree that this is intolerable.  The situation’s trespass upon decency does not simply reside in the additional two-hour drive that a weary wayfarer might have to make to the hotels of Y.  In fact it’s really irrelevant whether or not X has two dozen hotels and whether or not all except this one take every comer.  The moral issue is absolute and non-negotiable.  Extreme physical handicaps aside, people must not be denied service for reasons having nothing to do with their chosen behavior.

So the distinction involved in this two-part example should be clear.  My grandmother’s objection to a certain kind of tenant was plainly and wholly a matter of moral conduct; the person who wished to reside in her house need only have abstained from certain behavior which she found objectionable.  In contrast, the helpless traveler who might find himself turned away from the hotel in X would be banned for reasons over which he had utterly no control.  This is inhumane and blockheaded in a primitive tribal fashion unacceptable to free, fair-minded people.

Example Two: Now consider a baker who is approached by a homosexual couple and requested to make a cake for their wedding.  He politely declines, offering in excuse his moral principles as taught by his religion.  The cake itself he consents to bake, yet he refuses to decorate it in the fashion required of him; as a compromise, he offers to contact for his would-be clients another baker two blocks over.  None of this satisfies the gay couple.  Instead, they sue him for everything he’s worth—and win, effectively ruining his business.

Let’s make the example more interesting: let’s say that the baker specifies as a ground of his moral objection that encouraging the gay lifestyle may lead to one of the parties in such unions committing suicide.  Let us say further that after this particular couple has been married for five years, one of the pair indeed kills himself, leaving behind a letter that explains as a motive his long-standing troubles about his sexuality.  Now we have solid evidence that the baker’s worries were only too well justified.  Would he not have every right to counter-sue the survivor of the marriage, seeking all the money that was originally taken from him, as well as the projected profits of business never transacted and pain-and-suffering?  He feared that one of these two might severely suffer if a fraternal stop sign were not thrown up in his path: it appears that this is precisely what happened.  How could the baker possibly lose his case in court?

Nevertheless, we all know that he wouldn’t stand a chance.  This inequity is well worth considering.  It tells us much about the motives driving the forced acceptance in our society of non-biblical or conventionally aberrant lifestyles over the past three or four decades.

Final Example: Say that a pitching coach is approached by a father who demands that his son be taught how to throw a curveball.  This is not an extravagant request.  The boys is twelve, and many of his age are already throwing the pitch; yet our coach is convinced that giving the father what he wants might imperil the healthy development of the child’s arm, so he refuses.  The father sues the coach.  Evidence is sketchy.  The coach’s decision must be said to be based upon a subjective value judgment rather than clinical research, or even practical experience.  Furthermore, plenty of other coaches would willingly teach the boy just as directed.  For that reason alone, the father’s suit would surely be thrown out of court: the fine points of the coach’s claim would never come under scrutiny.  We could accept them as a professional’s judgment of a vague health risk, or we could conclude that the coach was irrationally but sincerely apprehensive about straining the boy’s arm.  Either way, however, the abundance of other options for the client would render a punitive judgment against the professional unnecessary, and even absurd.

What distinguishes these circumstances from those of Case One, where the traveler in search of lodging might have sought a room in several of X’s other hotels?  Our coach’s ground of objection has dubious moral value but is not overtly immoral; that is to say, we can recognize a predisposition to honor a moral objection even if we find it silly.  The defendant’s concern clearly focuses on harm being done to an innocent party.  When my grandmother refused to rent to people whose lifestyle was not abstinent, she too would readily have explained (if asked) that the sexual revolution was causing great damage to innocent victims, many of whom were not even aware of themselves as such.

Yet here we stray into a gray area.  I am by no means confident that as of the year 2000—and certainly not by 2015—a plaintiff might not have won a case against my grandmother, even though Austin abounds in single-occupant apartments.  The difference between her case and that of the reluctant coach would obviously be that the latter had not fallen afoul of political correctness, whereas the former might very likely be judged deserving of punishment for clinging to antediluvian values.

Conclusions: First of all, the convenient presence or inconvenient absence of a comparable server in these cases should never be considered.  I think the matter surfaces so often because we’ve grown uncomfortable with making moral determinations; but if a potential client is refused service based on factors that are morally invalid (and have no practical merit, as might certain physical limitations), then he shouldn’t be subjected to the trouble and humiliation of traveling even next door for proper attention.

Second, a genuine moral objection should target a specific act, not vaguely associate the client with a constellation of remote acts.  My grandmother wouldn’t have refused to rent to a pretty young woman on the supposition that the girl would be more pursued by men and hence more likely to break house rules.  Our hotel in X shouldn’t refuse Muslim lodgers because of 9/11.  The baker shouldn’t decline to produce a generic cake because the customer “looks gay” and might top off the confection later by posing two male figures at an altar.  The pitching coach shouldn’t refuse lessons to a certain boy with the claim, “Black kids get into sports and then neglect their studies.”  A moral objection responds to specific behavior and not to a careless ascription of behavioral patterns to broad groups.

Finally—and what’s obviously the central point of this piece—our system has been tending to adjudicate these cases, not with respect to how well they meet genuine moral criteria, with respect to how well they conform to politically correct doctrine.  No one cares about our somewhat over-punctilious pitching coach: he can go free, because his objections have no political value whatever.  In many locales, however, the system brings all of its force to requiring that bakers—and tee-shirt designers, and candlestick-makers—accommodate the overt promotion of the gay lifestyle.  Resistance to that lifestyle is assumed definitively immoral from the outset.  Or in my grandmother’s case, if a promiscuous tenant decided to haul her into court in 2019, does any of us doubt that she would be forced to rent the room and also pay damages for “emotional distress”?  Our courts haven’t so much thrown out biblical principles as they have decided to enforce an airy “Good Book” existing only in the heads of activist judges.  Do you suppose, at least, that the supercilious hotelier of X may still not turn away a traveler whose hair-color he doesn’t like?  I’m not so sure.  A Best Western hotel in a German city turned away attendees at an Alternatif fur Deutschland (AfD) conference last year.  The new-and-improved Klan is likely coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

I offer this final thought, not as a conclusion, but as an honest query.  Are we seeing this Procrustean surge of PC enforcement from the bench because we, as a decaying society, have decided to be done once and for all with guilt?  I’ve observed in my lifetime two favorite ways that people tormented by the inward conviction of their behavior’s wrongness will handle their torture—I mean, besides repenting and changing their ways.  One strategy is to repeat the behavior in hopes that the accompanying sense of trespass gets old and falls away.  The other, often used in tandem with the first, is to browbeat bystanders into silence, or even into praise of the culpable behavior.

Isn’t that what’s happening right now?  “You’re not going to get off with saying nothing against what I’ve done—no!  You’re going to bow to me, and then you’re going to rear back and applaud, and cry, ‘Oh, how brave!  How noble!  How we admire you!’  Do it… or die!”  This is the utterance of a damned soul teetering on the edge of Hell.  When the legal system glowers at us over that soul’s shoulder, exacting obedience with its clenched fist, we’re apt to think that our lives have reached a very dark place; but Hell is much darker, and choruses of forced praise will not suffice to make it disappear.